Selecting Your Investors Fred Wilson has been a venture investor and director in Return Path since 2000, first with Flatiron Partners and then with Union Square Ventures. We’ve been through a lot of wars together. In a couple of weeks, he and I are team-teaching a class in Entrepreneurship at Princeton, and the professor gave us the assignment of writing two pairs of blog posts to tee up discussion with the class. This is the first one…and Fred’s post on the other side of the topic is here. Next week, we’ll address the topic of building a successful CEO-VC partnership once it’s established. If you’re fortunate enough to have built a really strong early stage company, you will find yourself…
Category
Boards
Return Path’s Newest Board Member: Jeff Epstein
Return Path’s Newest Board Member: Jeff Epstein I’ve written before about how much I love my Board. Well, I’m pleased to announce I have a new reason to love it – today, I’m officially welcoming Jeff Epstein to the Return Path Board of Directors. He is joining an all-star cast that includes Greg Sands, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Scott Weiss and Scott Petry. I first met Jeff back in 2000 when, as CFO of DoubleClick, he and DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan agreed to invest in Return Path as our first institutional investor, along with Flatiron Partners. He is one of the few people who have seen the company grow from its infancy to today. Jeff has been a formal advisor…
What Makes an Awesome Board Member
What Makes an Awesome Board Member (This post was requested by my long-time Board member Brad Feld and is also running concurrently on his blog today) I’ve written a bunch of posts over the years about how I manage my Board at Return Path. And I think part of having awesome Board members is managing them well – giving transparent information, well organized, with enough lead time before a meeting; running great and engaging meetings; mixing social time with business time; and being a Board member yourself at some other organization so you see the other side of the equation. All those topics are covered in more detail in the following posts: Why I Love My Board, Part II, The…
Transparency Rules
Transparency Rules I think each and every one of our 13 core values at Return Path is important to our culture and to our success. And I generally don’t rank them. But if I did, People First is a leading contender to be at the top of the list. The other leading contender would be this last one in the series: We believe in being transparent and direct The big Inc. Magazine story about us last year talked a lot about our commitment to transparency and some of the challenges that come with being transparent and direct with people. I’d like to highlight here some of the benefits of being transparent, and the benefits of being direct (sometimes those two things…
Must-Read New Blog
Must-Read New Blog I’ve talked about Why I Love My Board a few times in the past. I was reminded at my quarterly Board meeting and dinner this week that it’s a great and unusually strong group, and we’re lucky to have them. Fred and Brad have both been prolific bloggers for years,and I know many of you follow their blogs closely. Think of that as getting a taste of the input and wisdom you’d get by having them on your Board. In a very exciting development, one of my independent directors, Scott Weiss, has now started blogging on the Andreessen-Horowitz platform. Scott is probably our most outspoken and colorful director (and that’s saying something). Scott just joined Andreessen-Horowitz as…
Should You Have a Board?
Should You Have a Board? As I mentioned last week, Fred’s post from a few months ago about an M&A Case study involving WhatCounts had a couple of provocative thoughts in it from CEO David Geller. The second one I wanted to address is whether or not you should have take on institutional investors and have a Board. As David said in the post: Fewer outsiders dictating (or strongly suggesting) direction means that you will be able to pursue your goals more closely and with less friction Although I have a lot of respect for David, I disagree with the notion that outsiders around the Board table is inherently bad for a business, or at least that the friction from…
Why I Love My Board
Why I Love My Board, Part II I’ve written a few things about my Board of Directors over the years, some of which I note below. Part I of this series isn’t particularly useful, though there’s an entertaining link in it to a video of Fred that’s worth looking at if you know or follow him. Today, we are happy to announce that we are adding a new independent director, Scott Petry, the founder of Postini and now a senior email product leader at Google (read the official press release [here]). Scott’s a fantastic addition to our already strong Board, and the process of recruiting and adding him has made me reflect a bit on my Board and its strengths…
Style, or Substance?
Style, or Substance? I had an interesting conversation the other day with a friend who sits on a couple of Boards, as do I (besides Return Path’s). We ended up in a conversation about some challenges one of his Boards is having with their CEO, and the question to some extent boiled down to this: a Board is responsible for hiring/firing the CEO and for being the guardians of shareholder value, but what does a Board do when it doesn’t like the CEO’s style? There are lots of different kinds of CEOs and corporate cultures. Some are command-and-control, others are more open, flat, and transparent. I like to think I and Return Path are the latter, and of course my…
The Good, The Board, and The Ugly
Fred, Brad, and Jerry have done a bunch of postings recently, and threaten to do more, sharing the VC perspective on many aspects of startups and entrepreneurship. I thought it might be interesting to share the entrepreneur’s perspective on the same subjects. I’ll try to cross-post and keep pace, but I’m already a couple behind, and I can’t crank out postings as fast as these guys can! (For reference, Fred and Brad are on my board, and Jerry as Fred’s partner is an advisor to my company, Return Path.) Topic 1: Boards of Directors. All three have many good points. Brad says that boards come in three flavors (working, reporting, and lame duck), and that small companies need working boards…
Who’s The Boss?
That’s not just the title of a mediocre 1980’s sitcom starring Tony Danza, it’s a question I get periodically, including last week in an interview. A writer I know is working on an article on entrepreneurship and asked me, “Before you started your own business, how did you like working for other people?” The question made me think a little bit. I know what she was asking — how I liked being the boss instead of working for one — but the way she phrased it is interesting and revealing about what it’s like to be a CEO. One of the biggest differences between being in a company and starting or running one is that you’re not working for a…